Agreed. Also, having bred rabbits for meat in my life, buying rabbits from a pet store is pretty pointless if you're planning to eat it. I guess you could get some meat from it but you wouldn't get much bang for your buck. (Unless they sell usual meat-rabbits in the US, in that case I take back my comment).

Because its easier to picture a professional cleaning and preparing an animal that was meant for food, rather than a guy taking a cleaver to a rabbit fresh out of the pet supermarket box in his kitchen.

I'm not much of a hunter (at all), but if you wanna talk about how humane it is I'm sure that the process the butchers use would be way way more comfortable for the rabbit than this guy's modus operandi.

Eating rabbit isn't that weird; unless you don't eat any meat in which case yes the one from the butcher is no better than living one. I think theres a certain level of barbarism in buying a bunny and then killing it vs buying a tray of meat from the shops. I know in the end an animal still ends up dead; but doing it yourself feels a lot more barbaric. When our meat comes in nice trays without any hair or really anything that reminds us of the cute animal it came from it removes us from the violent act of actually killing it.

Guys, relax. He didn't buy a rabbit from a pet store and slaughter it. The skinned hare is much larger than the pet store rabbit and is cut in the same way you'd find hare at a butcher shop, which is where he bought it from. If eating hare offends you, maybe you should stop eating meat in general.

It isn't offensive to eat meat. It's offensive that he's posting this because people he calls "friends" got a pet rabbit at the store. People eat dogs and cats. But I'm sure you would find it disturbing if a friend of yours was like, "Hey, so my friends just got a new dog, I got one myself!" And then posted pictures of them butchering a dog.

You are correct, it is not the same rabbit. The cooked rabbit is from the grocery story and took days to thaw. He did it to troll OP who was posting pics of her new pet bunny. He moved pics within an hour and apologized. Source: I know them both.

I think it's absolutely hilarious. You're all a bunch of little straight up bitches. You're fine with having meat handed to you, but seeing an animal slaughtered up close suddenly makes you feel inhumane? It's inhumane hording thousands of these animals in a slaughterhouse. Killing the animal yourself is the HUMANE way. It's respectful.

It isn't about the act of killing that I think we're mostly disturbed by, it's the fact that this guy is taking pleasure in the act and enjoys disturbing others.

I understand that meat comes from death. But this isn't a farmer whose living depends on slaughtering animals. That person slaughters for a living. Nor is this a hunter with an animal who had a fair chance. This is just a disturbed individual.

Rabbit tastes good. My dad used to raise rabbits, and me and my brothers would play with them and get attached, then we would watch him go to the cage, grab one by it's hind legs and pop it in the head with a baseball bat, clean it and cook it.

I don't really have a problem with this. I get what you're all upset about and that's fine, but personally I think it's a neat (albeit maybe a bit extreme) way to shock people into seeing how their meat is processed. You guys that are calling him a psychopath are overreacting - hell it could've been an entirely different rabbit that he bought elsewhere. There's no way to tell.

Yeah there's such a discrepancy between eating a rabbit for food and buying a rabbit from the pet store to slaughter it and post the pictures on a social networking site.

What a fucking sicko.

Fuck the rules, this guy deserves to be bullied. I mean seriously, I have nothing against eating meat but don't buy a fucking rabbit from the pet store, pose with it all cute, and then fucking skin it and chop it's head off.

Fuck the rules, this guy deserves to be bullied. I mean seriously, I have nothing against eating meat but don't buy a fucking rabbit from the pet store, pose with it all cute, and then fucking skin it and chop it's head off.

You are aware that the warehouse breeders that sell to petstores are most often the same that breed the feeder animals for the reptile industry?

Logically though, ignoring the negative social aspects, how is buying a rabbit from a pet store, humanely killing it, and eating it different to buying one off a butcher and eating it?

It's in poor taste that he would post this to Facebook, but otherwise there isn't really anything shocking about this.

The comments here are honestly more cringe than the picture. It's almost as if people don't know where the meat they buy in stores comes from. If you really cared about animals, and their treatment, you would care about the millions farmed and slaughtered every day, not the one that happened to get its picture taken and posted on Facebook.

How is this different from selecting a lobster at a restaurant to eat?

Regardless, it doesn't look like he killed and prepared the rabbit shown anyway. Anyone who studies the picture closely can see the difference in size. The meat looks like it's from a hare. He probably went to an exotic meat shop and bought it like that.

What if he ate it for fun? Is that not what most meat consumption is in our contemporary society?

What's more, I really have to shake my head at the notion of being confronted with images of animal slaughter, something that much of human society operates upon, should be considered as a "desire to cause pain" as much as it could be considered "a desire to examine different approaches to humanity's relationship with animals".

I'd have to say that I'd far rather he dispel conceptions about meat production than continue the fantasy of happy frolicking wildlife, jump-cut into a packaged carcass, and that it would only cause pain to people who have a very naive relationship with their food.

Sadistic? Why would you think that? Because he posted it on facebook? Don't befriend any butchers. You probably wouldn't like what you saw. Some people have no problem killing their food themselves and don't see it as a bad thing whatsoever. I don't know any butchers that have a problem killing a cow or a goat or a pet turkey - and eating it.

You're just emotional and upset. I hope you're at least vegan, given how upset you seem to be.

That's the worse thing really - not a die-hard vegan getting understandably upset at seeing what they (profoundly mistakenly) see as "murder", it's people who quite happily eat whatever meat products are put in front of them and refuse to comprehend where they came from.

I'd happily live in a society where selling prepared meat was unusual, and you generally had to hunt or at least butcher it yourself. People eat healthier, care more about the environment and are more sociable and cooperative.

Sometimes it's not allowed, at a lot of petstore you are signing a contract to care for the animal, like at petsmart you can't buy rodents for your snake, your signing a contract to keep it as a pet. Also, there are laws about butchering animals and where you can, you can't just butcher a chicken or rabbit in your yard in a lot of places. Those are a few of the problems I see with it.

I think it's the inherent hypocrisy he's illustrating - that because it's sold as "pet" it's completely different from the animal that's sold in a butcher's shop. Whilst I doubt he actually did this (most countries make butchering animals an extremely regulated and licensed affair), he's making a good point.

He took a picture at a pet store with a rabbit then went to a butcher and bought a separate rabbit. This should be pretty easily gleaned by the with rabbit photos only being in the pet store and the skinned rabbit being much larger

Guess it depends largely on how you use Facebook. If you use it for acquaintances and work colleagues etc., then definitely not the kind of joke you post on Facebook, but for close friends who can understand and accept your humour? Then anything goes really.

People have been eating rabbits for a very long time. For almost as long as they've been eating rabbits, they've been raising rabbits to be eaten. Not only that, rabbits can be raised on a diet of wild vegetation, rather than more expensive corn that we feed cows and chickens, and they, well, breed like rabbits.

By many objective metrics, butchering and eating rabbits is actually a very smart thing to do. Rabbits are an insanely effective and efficient food source and human beings have been doing exactly this for thousands of years.

But to buy one from a pet store to kill? That's so fucked up. I understand hunting, it's fair game to try to kill the animal. But the purchase one from a store? Wheres the fair game in that. That rabbit could've been a 5 year olds best friend but now it's some sickos Facebook album

I would argue that the point of domesticating livestock is that we don't have to hunt them.

As someone who grew up in an environment where people frequently raised pets for food, this doesn't seem to strange to me. You buy baby chickens and rabbits and pigs at the store (you want the babies because then they're much cheaper because the primary "dealer" isn't raising them through adulthood), whether it be a pet store or an agricultural store, you raise it to adulthood, and feed your family.

Or, to put it another way, I once bought crickets from the pet store to breed and eat (it was an experiment with a friend, and actually everything went better than expected!). How is that any different?

Posting the pictures on facebook is a little strange. Nothing else about this is.Frankly, this is probably better than normal meat. At least the rabbit had a good, if short, life at the pet store. Any meat you buy from a store is gonna come from a factory farm where the animals were lucky if they ever saw the sun or breathed fresh air even once.That being said, this way would be absurdly expensive, and there are people who would've wanted that as a pet so it's a bit wasteful.Still, when put in perspective, it's really not all that bad.

When I was growing up in San Francisco, my parents would take us to a rabbit farm in Colma, just south of SF. We would walk up and down aisles of caged rabbits, picking out the ones we liked.

Yes, we kids would pick out the rabbits that we liked - and our choice had nothing to do with size or fat content, just how cute they were. Those rabbits would then be butchered, in front of us and voilà, that night's dinner.

I had no idea that we were a family of psychopaths. Thank you, humorless PETA-crazed redditors, for shining a light on what I thought was a perfectly normal, thousands-of-years-old custom, but was actually a hideous crime.

Oh for heaven's sake, you can totally tell it was just a joke, and a pretty clever and funny one, at that. Even if it had been his own rabbit that he bought and slaughtered, so what? No different to the one in the supermarket, is it?

Are you sure this guy isn't a butcher or chef? I post pictures of pig heads, lobsters, random meats and dead animals all the time. In fact I have rabbit on special right now. I don't think this guys a "sicko" or "insane" at all. We just don't have the full story here. Even OPs first bookmark is called "recipes". OP is hiding something from us for magical internet points....ಠ_ಠ